The present invention generally relates to a control system for use with home video equipment to allow viewing of video tapes to be selectively controlled. More particularly, the present invention relates to a control system in which the user selects video cassette programs which may be played on the video equipment according to a rating given to a prerecorded feature length film or the like which is found on the video cassette.
Rentals of prerecorded video cassette programs for use with home video equipment has become a major industry which is still growing. The home video market has led to the making of hundreds to thousands of new movies and other programs for the box office and home video market or exclusively for the home video market. These prerecorded films may be distributed across the entire country for rental to individuals by a rental agent through means of a video distributing business. The films produced each year comprise titles ranging from children's video to adult films and everything in between including extremely graphic horror films or extremely violent films. A problem has arisen in that many films which were previously inaccessible to children or teenagers are now readily available in the video rental stores. It has thus been found that the parents of these children and teenagers do not have any real control over the movies which can be rented and viewed at home by the children. Many programs which are accessible at video rental outlets to children are given a restricted rating which would be limited to teenagers over 17 years of age or to children only with parental guidance at a theater. The film rating system conventionally used in the industry has been developed so that parents and owners of movie theaters can effectively control the viewing of certain movies to certain classes of people based upon the content of the movie. The obscene language, nudity and violence more frequently found in films presently made are thus indicated with the proper rating such that parents who may object to their children viewing such material may prevent such viewing. With the advent of movie rentals on video cassettes, the parental control over this process has been reduced to a significant degree.
Another problem is found in that many movies which are now produced exclusively for the home video market are not rated at all as the mere number of movies prohibits such a rating scheme. Thus, the parents as well as video rental businesses have no indication of the content of many films. Rental of such films to children may be objectional to the parents but there is no effective way in which viewing of objectionable films may be deterred. Similarly, the parents themselves may have video tapes at their home which they desire not to be viewed by their children, and no effective means has been developed for preventing such viewing.
Several parental control inventions have been developed to prevent unauthorized playing of a video cassette tape, such as that found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,628,713. In this invention, a lock for a VHC video cassette comprises an insert which is placed in a sensor LED transmission receptacle of the housing of the cassette tape. The insert cannot be removed except with a special key and presents a physical obstruction to the cassette tape being inserted into a video cassette recorder. Although the lock apparatus for VHS video cassettes allows some selective control over unauthorized playing of a video cassette by parents or the like, such a system is somewhat ineffective for use by a video rental business and similarly is not useful for other video format video cassettes such as BETA. The use of such a lock is also somewhat inconvenient and requires a plurality of locks to be obtained for each video cassette on which it is to be used.
Similarly, as found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,655,057 a security device comprising a front panel to cover the opening through which a video cassette is placed into a video recorder. Although such a security device prevents unauthorized access to the video cassette recorder for viewing of video tapes, it prevents all use of the video recorder and does not enable selective discrimination against video cassette tapes which are not to be viewed as desired by parents. Another security device is shown in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,656,551, which forms a dummy video cassette which includes an externally operable mechanism to initiate a locking means which locks the dummy cassette into the video recorder as an inseparable unit. In this way, no other cassettes may be placed into the video recorder and use of the video recorder is thereby inhibited.
From these devices, it is seen that prior methods to prevent unauthorized viewing include inhibiting the use of the entire video cassette recorder or alternatively of mechanical apparatus to prevent use of individual cassette tapes. There is not found a convenient and effective way in which viewing of adult movies, extremely violent movies or other objectionable material may be prevented at the discretion of parents or video rental business owners. This discretion may be according to a rating given to the film or other video material by a professional association or alternatively by the parents or video store owners according to the content of the material.